Lura Lynn Ryan bears it all with quiet fortitude

December 03, 2006|By Mary Schmich.

It may be tempting to reduce Lura Lynn Ryan to a cardboard cutout labeled "wife," yet another woman towed into trouble by a husband and his deeds.

"What is she really thinking?" I found myself wondering Thursday, gazing at a flat newspaper image of a pale-haired woman in oversized glasses who the day before had been summoned once again to do the wifely duty she surely couldn't have imagined 50 years ago when she said her wedding vows.

In the photo, Mrs. Ryan had stepped outside her unassuming two-story, red-brick home in Kankakee to turn on her Christmas lights and told a Tribune reporter that she was "very, very happy" about the news: Her husband, George, the former governor, would stay out of prison while an appeals court decided whether to uphold his conviction for corruption.

She also called it "a Christmas blessing."

One person who gets a glimpse of life behind the door is Jennifer Linzer, which is why I called her on Thursday. She'd just been chatting with Mrs. Ryan on the phone.

"I haven't seen her this talkative in months," she said.

Linzer is the assistant director of the Center on Wrongful Convictions at Northwestern University. She's tall, outspoken, not religious, married to a Northwestern dean.

In other words, she's not much like small, even-tempered, devout Lura Lynn Ryan, who grew up on a farm, married a guy who became a pharmacist and raised six children.

"I could never live her life," said Linzer when I asked her for her impressions of Mrs. Ryan, "but I find her remarkable."

Linzer met the Ryans while helping the former governor with his campaign against the death penalty. When his trial started last year, she wanted him to know that she hadn't abandoned him, so for the next seven months, she routinely sat at Lura Lynn's side in the courtroom.

Just doing it, Linzer said, is what farm women do, and in that culture, women often dedicate their work to the men's work.

"I can see that thread running through her life," she says. "And that early rural fortitude has really helped her."

Mrs. Ryan's fortitude was reinforced and tested when she was a young mother with six kids, at one point with five in diapers.

"I said to her one time, `Did you have any help?'" Linzer recalls.

Yes, Mrs. Ryan answered. Once a week, someone came to relieve her--so she could go to the grocery store. And sometimes in those years, Mrs. Ryan told her, she'd stand at the washing machine and weep.

People often say Mrs. Ryan is sweet. Linzer says "sweet" is too simple.

"Sweet" underestimates her strength, though her strength is easy to underestimate, because she doesn't flaunt it. What she is is well-mannered and maternal, even to people who aren't her children. She'll always ask about your family.

"There's a warmth about her that's more common to that generation," Linzer says. "She has this spirit, this twinkle. She's very smart. She has a huge heart. She's one of those people who sees the glass as more than half full."

Only once in the years she's known Mrs. Ryan, Linzer says, has she seen her get angry, and that passed quickly.

Linzer says that, in the style of their generation, George Ryan is the more dominant partner, but their marriage is a solid partnership.

"Do they argue?" she says. "I don't know. I do know that they have a sweet relationship, as relationships go. They laugh a lot. They're best friends."

They still talk about their high school romance, she says.

Listening to Linzer talk, I found myself wondering: Could it really be this simple? Doesn't Lura Lynn Ryan ever fume, "This is not what I signed up for when I got married"?

Then again, maybe it is that simple. Trouble and loyalty are exactly what you sign up for when you get married, whether or not you know it.